Social cognition is a sub-topic of cognitive psychology that focuses on how people perceive, store, and apply knowledge about other individuals and social circumstances. It reflects on the role cognitive processes play in our social experiences. The way we think about others plays a key role in how we think, feel, and interact with the world around us.
Defining Social Cognition
How should psychologists describe social cognition? While there is no universal concept, there are several common factors that many experts have defined as significant.
Social cognition involves:
- The factors involved in the understanding of other people and how we come to learn about the people around us in the world.
- It includes the study of these mental mechanisms involved in perceiving, recalling, learning about, and listening to other individuals in our social environment.
- Psychologists are involved in why we’re going to get some knowledge about the social world. How this information is stored in memory, and how it is used to communicate with other individuals.
- It is not necessarily a topic of social psychology-it is an introduction to the study of every aspect of social psychology. Using a social-cognitive viewpoint, researchers may study a wide variety of subjects, including beliefs, personal experiences, biases, assumptions, self-conceptions, sexism, motivation, decision-making, and other fields.
The Role of Social Cognition
Imagine, for starters, that you’re getting ready to go on a blind date. Not only are you worried about the experiences and indications you send to the other person, but you are also worried about the perception of the indications sent by the other person. How do you make the impression of this person? What do the other person’s actions mean to you?
It is only one example of how social awareness influences a single social experience, but you can think of even more cases of your everyday lives. We spend a large portion of our day engaging with people, which is why a whole field of psychology has been developed to help us understand how we behave, perceive and respond in social settings.
The Development of Social Cognition
Developmental researchers are now researching how social learning evolves during infancy and adolescence. When children grow up, they are more conscious not just of their own feelings, perceptions and motivations, but also of the attitudes and mental states of others.
When the knowledge grows, they are more adept at recognizing how people feel, at learning how to respond to social interactions, at engaging in pro-social actions, and at looking after others.
Although there are several various hypotheses looking at how social learning evolves, one of the most famous reflects on the work of the psychologist Jean Piaget. According to Piaget, emotional growth in a kid is passing through a variety of stages.
- In the early stages of development, kids become very egocentric. They view the world from their own viewpoint and fail to learn about whether many people can see the world.
- As children mature, they become more and more adept at perspective-taking and have an increased ability to think about how and why people act as they do in social situations.
More recently, research has shown that children develop the ability to think about the points of view of other people at an earlier age than Piaget had previously believed. And early preschoolers have the potential to learn about how other people may see a scenario.
One of the most important advances in the early history of social thought is the emergence of mind theory. Mind philosophy refers to a person’s capacity to perceive and learn of other people’s emotional states.
This is the development of a theory of mind that is essential to the capacity to understand the emotions, motivations, expectations, wishes, perceptions, and interactions that other individuals may have. Being able to learn about how these emotional states can affect how people behave is crucial to shaping social attitudes and understanding how and why people do the things they do.
Reference: https://www.verywellmind.com/social-cognition-2795912
